107. Scale and Pitch of Pan’s Pipes
A startling parallelism has been demonstrated between the Pan’s pipes of the Solomon islands in Melanesia and those of the northwest Brazilian Indians. The odd pipes differ, each from the next, by the interval of a fourth. The even pipes give notes half-way in pitch between the adjacent odd ones, and thus form another “circle of fourths.” But the similarity does not end here. The absolute pitch of the examined instruments from Melanesia and Brazil is the same. Thus, the vibration rates in successive pipes are 557 and 560.5; 651 and 651; 759 and 749; 880 and 879! This is so close a coincidence as to seem at first sight beyond the bounds of accidental convergence. The data have in fact been offered, and in some quarters accepted, as evidence of a historical connection between the western Pacific and South America. Yet the connection would have had to be ancient, since no memory of it remains nor is it supported by resemblances in race, speech, nor anything obvious in culture. The instruments are perishable. Primitive people, working by rule of thumb, would be unable to produce an instrument of given absolute pitch except by matching it against another, and perhaps not then. Moreover, it is not known that absolute pitch is of the least concern to them. It is therefore incredible that this correspondence rests on any ancient diffusion: there must be an error in the record somewhere, or the one accident in a million has happened in the particular instruments examined.
The identity of scale or intervals however remains, and may be a true case of parallelism. Only, as usual, it boils down to a rather simple matter. The circles of fourths evidently originate in the practice, in both regions, of overblowing the pipes. This produces over-tones; of which the second, the “third partial tone,” is the fifth above the octave of the fundamental, so that successive notes in either the odd or even series of pipes, would, on the octave being disallowed, differ by fourths. The basis of the resemblance, then, is a physical law of sound. The cultural similarity shrinks to the facts of pipes in series, the use of overblown tones, and the intercalating odd-even series. Even these resemblances are striking, and more specific than many cited cases of parallelism. In fact, were they supported by enough resemblances in other aspects of culture, they would go far to compel belief in actual connections between Melanesia and Brazil.